Let’s be clear about what happened last night, because the language of the law has a way of turning grand theft into a procedural footnote. The Supreme Court of the United States - six conservatives, all of them appointed by Republican presidents, three of them by a man who still can’t stop whining about losing an election he lost 6 years ago - handed the state of Alabama permission to use a congressional map that a federal district court had already ruled was the product of intentional racial discrimination. Not suspected discrimination. Not alleged discrimination. Intentional racial discrimination. And SCROTUS said: go ahead, use it anyway.

There is a law. It is not ambiguous. The statute that created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence - the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, passed in the wake of September 11 as a direct response to the intelligence failures that allowed nineteen men to hijack four planes - says plainly that the person holding that office "shall have extensive national security expertise." Congress was not being poetic. They were writing the lesson of mass catastrophe into federal code: this job requires people who know what they're doing.